Deming and Lean: The Disparities and Similarities

In my opinion Deming’s ideas and lean thinking share many similarities. I do see plenty of weaknesses in lean manufacturing efforts at organizations. Most of the weaknesses are due to bad implementation of lean manufacturing rather than lean thinking missing fundamental elements included in Deming’s management system.

A very common point of criticism (from Deming folks) of lean efforts is that they fail to address the management system: saying “lean” merely provides a few tools and what executives do doesn’t change. Understanding the importance of focusing on the entire management system is core to understanding Deming. The problem with criticizing lean manufacturing based on this however, is that the lean folks people should listen to all know that deploying a few tools is not what lean is about.

Such criticisms leveled at lean are no different than those leveled at organizations over the decades that use a few of the tools Deming talked about and picked a point or two from Deming’s 14 points and Deming’s deadly diseases to address and then struggle. Deming didn’t advocate using a couple tools and ignoring the management system; neither does lean manufacturing.

It is no surprise that lean manufacturing has so much in common with Deming. Toyota’s management system was designed based on Dr. Deming’s ideas. Toyota took Deming’s ideas and, as Dr. Deming encouraged, adapted those ideas into a management system that worked in their organization. They experimented and extended the ideas and over time developed some new tools and enhanced existed tools and techniques that are quite useful and consistent with Deming’s thinking.

Shoichiro Toyoda, Honorary Chairman and director of Toyota: “There is not a day I don’t think about what Dr. Deming meant to us. Deming is the core of our management.”

Sarah shows many sources of overlap between lean and Deming thinking. One of those is how they both focus on the customer and customer value. Various tools and concepts on this topic are used by both management systems; while each may emphasis different wording the approaches are very similar (customer focus, Kano model – loss function, going to the gemba, what job does your product or service solve for customers, value stream, training within industry…). The way both management systems focus on the customer are closer to each other than any other management styles I am familiar with.

Lean manufacturing and Deming focused on the importance of treating employees with respect and creating systems that allow employees to think and drive improvement. Again the way these two systems address this issue is more similar than any other system I can think of. Many management efforts give lip service to valuing employees but few create reliable system that result in concrete action.

As she says: “how can we create more value and create jobs.” This is one of the areas where poor implementations may give people the wrong impression about what lean means or Deming’s ideas mean. Some people talk about lean being mainly about “reducing waste” and then jump to the conclusion lean is about reducing staff. Good efforts based on Deming’s ideas or lean principles do not have layoffs. Many organizations fail to follow this fundamental principle but that is a failure of those organizations not lean manufacturing or Deming. Both systems specially mention the importance of respecting people; if improvements result in fewer workers being needed to do certain jobs those workers are moved to other parts of the organization.

Both systems focus a great deal of effort on continually improving processes. They both are based on the understanding that continual improvement is important and that is achieved by engaging the brains of the people doing the work on making the processes better day after day. They both encourage investment in training employees on using improvement tools and creating systems where those improvements are made sustainable through standardization.

As Sarah mentions, lean organizations probably have a bit more acceptance of inspection. I still believe the best lean organizations rely on inspection much less than most organizations. But I would say lean efforts are a bit more accepting of this practice.

Deming talked about standardization, documenting processes, training employees, continual improvement of job processes. But I think lean organizations (the good ones) actually do this better than most Deming organizations. I think this is primarily a result of most of the Deming folks in the last few decades just not focusing on things like job instructions, visual management, kanban, etc. as much as good lean efforts have focused on them. I think Deming’s thoughts in this area have been better implemented by those good lean organizations. It isn’t a matter of the philosophies being different on this point, it is just my opinion that the implementation is a bit different and Deming folks would be served to put more focus on what the lean thinking organization are doing in those areas. You can try to make ties to what goes on in agile software development fitting into this but in general I think this is just something most agile efforts don’t pay much attention to (and there are reasons for some of this area to have less focus in agile, I believe).

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Deming has been ignored in the US other than random lip service. It takes to much work to involve employees by upper management and why involve employees if they aren’t in the know like upper management? It always amazes me the garbage that gets forced into perfectly good running organizations because upper management feels it’s time for a change. Computers can’t make things, people do. Systems are only as good as the people using them. Computers will eventually be unable to hold back the hackers and bugs or the “change for the sake of change” computer developers who screw up well running programs with “new and improved” monkey wrenches.

Deming says here are 7 Deadly Diseases – start here. Does Lean say anything about the waste associated with these points? Can you have a Lean organization and still promote performance appraisals? I think it’s more than bad implementation.

I’ve thought about this, written about it and made some presentations on the topic.

In researching one presentation, I traced the roots of what people are calling “lean” in a fine book “the birth of lean”, published by the lean enterprise institute. What I learned (and shared in my presentation) is that Dr. Deming helped lay the foundation for what has become known as “lean” at toyota and other companies. To be more specific, total quality control (the japanese way, not the american way) was a necessary foundational element for the toyota production system and other lean management systems.

A major problem (in my opinion) is the loss of understanding of variation in the thread of what people are being taught and learning today. I have ideas on lots of potential causes for this (the unfortunate diversion with six sigma, lack of full understanding by people who are teaching, and the time that has lapsed since japanese leaders learned this important principle until the present).

Many people (I think) have placed Dr. Deming’s teachings into one container and “lean” in another container, and they don’t see the connection.

[…] You’ve now discovered another part of the integrated system that neither your friend nor your consultant told you about, because they just assumed you’d have wi-fi. It reminds me of the Dr. Deming expression that “a fish doesn’t know it’s in water.” An understanding of Deming’s teachings is generally assumed within Toyota, so it goes unmentioned in many Lean books (although modern Toyota executives don’t hide their continued admiration for him). […]

The Deming philosophy is much broader than “lean.” The auto industry was not the only industry using Dr. Deming’s philosophy. Electronics, steel and many other industries did the Japanese capture the market.